The term robot supposedly first appeared in the 1920 Czech drama collective R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. They were humanoid machines created in a factory by scientists using a formula. The template for robots was humans. In this present age where the rights of "non-human persons", or at least those of animals, were increasingly being recognized, we had to give it to the Czech dramatist for his prescience. The robot inventory of Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.) company warehouse currently held 347,000 units. Harry Domin, the CEO of R.U.R. acknowledged the capacity of these robots to be taught.

DOMIN. Well. You could share with them whatever you want. You could read them the Bible, logarithms, anything. You could even teach them about human rights. [1]

Coming from somebody called Domin, that was quite a superior statement. According to Dr. Gall, the R.U.R.'s chief of research and physiological department, robots had to be taught "pain" in order for them to protect themselves from destroying themselves. This was for "industrial reasons" (read: pure capitalist motives). Robots could destroy themselves if they don't know how to feel pain. They could put their hands inside a machine, where their fingers are chopped off, their heads could be broken, even if they don't feel anything. "Kailangan nating ipakilala sa kanila ang kirot; natural na proteksiyon iyon laban sa pagkasira." (We had to teach them the concept of pain; it will be their natural protection against destruction.)

Čapek offered a scenario of the future, a Gedankenexperiment. Humans will rely on robots to do all forms of labor for them. As Domin explained, the human kind would now have the time to do anything they wanted. Poverty would then disappear. True, he said, humans would become unemployed as a consequence, but that was because no job would even need to be performed by any human being at all! The machines would do all the things at their bidding. And as a bonus, human slavery would finally be a thing of the past. Mankind would just be left to pursue its perfection.

Helena Glory, the woman who visited the factory, would have none of it. She believed it was a terrible situation for the robots, and it was a violation of natural law, for even if male and female robots were created, they did not feel anythings for each other. They will never love, will never bear children, will never hold a newborn baby in their likeness in their arms.

But since this was first-rate science fiction, it was only a matter of time before the robots were provoked and awakened, before a labor union of robots was organized. It was only a matter of time for the human spark to flare inside the robots and for them to finally revolt against their masters and creators.

Our Czech writer carried the logic of this dystopia to the end. (And it would not be farfetched to imagine that this play might itself be a product of a robot's thinking ...) The situation and characters, humans and non-humans alike, were vivid. It was a Marxist comedy, a satire on human intellect and ingenuity, a perfect product of neo-liberal capitalist society, a slogan for non-human persons' rights. It was written in 1920, a pioneer of visceral robotic imagination, a defining work, way ahead of any ghosts in the shell, the terminators, pacific rims, blade runners, and ex machinas [2].Notes:1. The play was translated into Filipino from Claudia Novack's English version. Since I don't have a copy of Novack, I back-translated the passages, as well as the paraphrases, above.2. Spoiler: Here we were introduced to the "Čapek test" (contra Turing test) of determining whether a non-human robot finally exhibits the characteristics of a biological human being. It was a simple biological test, and it involves a robot mimicking the characteristics of living things, reproduction being the clincher criterion. The other human aspects (empathy, tolerance) might be easier to test for robots. I mean, even for humans these aspects were hard to come by. The likelihood of failure was high.

March 30, 2018

Yūko Tsushima's early novels and stories, at least those that were translated so far, were of a piece. They were variations of a single theme: they constantly featured single mothers and their struggles to raise their daughters alone in modern Japanese society that was still marked by traditional mores. Her latest in translation, Territory of Light, appeared originally in 1978-79, between the publication of Child of Fortune (1978) and Woman Running in the Mountains (1980). It might not be far-fetched to say that each of the first person narrators in these I-novels (Shishōsetsu) could be substituted for each other. They registered the same cold voice, the same stubbornness, and the same calculated rebelliousness.

While the backgrounds of the female characters were the same, the individuated details and poetic images were what made them distinctly whole and apart. The silent voice and quiet devastation lingered in each for a long time. The single mother was thankfully not a saint or martyr, but just a plain human being, what shallow readers would usually detest for being "unlikeable" or "unrelatable". Because they were fallible and often turned down by their own failings, their journeys were all the more interesting. They usually began as a newly separated single mother, challenged by ordinary circumstances, judged by society and their designated moral police or arbiters, and eventually, gradually, gaining and recognizing their self-worth.

Even if I was an incorrigible fool, I wanted to believe that there was still something fundamental in me worthy of my own respect.

With combined humility of character and stinging outbursts of emotion, the wife decided to file for divorce from Fujino, her husband, after he practically abandoned her and their daughter. This decision was rebuffed by her and Fujino's friends and acquaintances. "Nothing good will come of a divorce", one would say to convince her to backtrack from her decision. "Believe me, nothing goes right for a woman of her own", another one would tell her pointedly. And her husband would chastise her, "how are you going to manage with the little one on your own?" "Shadowy figures", who seemingly were conspiring collectively against her, would plague her consciousness. This novel was as much a poetic journey toward an unknown epiphany as a psychological journey (or "transformation", though that word is overused) of the woman from a helpless single mother to an independent individual able to repulse at every turn the forces that compel her not to turn away from her husband and "ruin" the family.

*

Among her virtues as a novelist, Tsushima's extraordinary display of compassion and empathy was the most haunting. Contemplating the reasons behind a woman's suicide by jumping in front of a train, the narrator of Territory of Light was "gripped by a sense that [she] shouldn't distance [herself] from the person who'd gone under the train as if it were nothing to do with [her]." Her extraordinary sympathy extended from the singular victim to the collective.

What burden of suffering or grief had brought them [the suicides] to this point? How long had they spent on this platform, and what were they looking at? They'd stood here alone, unnoticed. Now there was a whole crowd staring at the cast-off physical body, mangled and bloodied. What pain had driven them to it? I wanted to know, I badly wanted to know.

In several instances, the female protagonist was creating scenarios in her mind where she tried to communicate with characters or imagine a conversation. She would, for example, recall a story in her childhood wherein several children talked about the miraculous survival of a boy who fell from the school's rooftop, who had fortuitously landed on a water trough just about his own size. She would consider the veracity of this story in hindsight, and assume that the story might be a fictionalized account because it was convenient for children to think so.

The children might well have made up that version of events. Maybe one of them saw the accident victim's body, noticed the nearby cistern, thought 'If only he'd landed in there', and in a moment of anger at the child who hadn't fallen where he should, decided to forget he was dead. Reality couldn't be as brutal as that. Perhaps the child who saw returned to his playmates, not giving the body with its shattered skull a backward glance, and reported: 'They say someone fell off the roof, but he fell right into the water and he's fine,' adding, with a laugh, 'Some people do the weirdest things!' Yes, I remember the rumour as always being accompanied by laughter. The children had realized that it was possible to survive a fall from a roof, despite the grownups' best efforts to scare them, and the shared sense of superiority this gave them made them erupt in laughter.

This made-up story would itself be tested by the end of the chapter. In any case, this building of an alternate reality within the reality of the fictional fabric, making up a different version of past events, a kind of fiction within fiction, was a technique that Tsushima was using since Child of Fortune, her first novel, and was exploited in full in her novel Laughing Wolf. In the latter, the children's points of view were the departure point to set off convenient fictions, assumptions, and simulations to stave off the brutality of reality. As the narrator confessed at one point, "it cheered me up to expand the bounds of what I could think of as not impossible."

In a scene of the mother and daughter visiting a tree park on a Sunday, she imagined a playful conversation with another pair of mother and daughter she encountered in the park. The imagined version of an event to suit one's convenience was also akin to the imagined transaction or trade in "The Silent Traders", one of Tsushima's signature stories in The Shooting Gallery. In an almost similar manner and voice, the mother created a fictional version of a "silent trade" in her mind as a substitute to the boredom, insecurity, and fear she felt as a single mother, this time looking for a child who just ran away from her.

Tsushima's approach to the novel was also unique in terms of her handling of imagery. The twelve chapters, which originally came out in monthly installments in a Japanese periodical, were often built around a single image mentioned in the title. Hence, "The Water's Edge" was centered around the flooding of the apartment roof. The narrative unfolded with the restraint and grace of the elements – light, water, wind, sand dunes, trees, birds, fire. And with light as the dominant, illuminating image, the poetry was evident in the sentences. Geraldine Harcourt, the perennial translator of Tsushima's novels and stories, must have been on point and extra cautious in her selection of words here if she can reproduce sentences like, "The early summer leaves were still young; they stirred coolly at the tips of the branches, giving off tiny gleams that flitted like insects", or "The more of those gloomy, cramped apartments I looked at, the further the figure of my husband receded from sight, and while the rooms were invariably dark, I began to sense a gleam in their darkness like that of an animal's eyes. There was something there glaring back at me. Although it scared me, I wanted to approach it."

Harcourt was able to reproduce not only Tsushima's poetic touches but also her characteristic motifs here and in stories elsewhere – shooting galleries, aquariums – including the abiding figure of a mentally handicapped boy who, like a guardian angel, was almost to be expected in every novel and story of Tsushima's. Another fascinating aspect of the stories was the dream sequences which the mother constantly relived as if to assuage her heightened anxiety.

While the element of water was also very pronounced, as it was in Child of Fortune and in "The Watery Realm", from the recent two-story sampler Of Dogs and Walls (2018), it is the titular imagery of light that surfaces now and again in the novel. In the tradition of Sōseki's Meian (Light and Darkness) and Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, Tsushima fully embraced the light and bathed her scenes in it.

My daughter ... scampered off towards the pond. I ran after her, out of breath. A weeping willow stood at the point where the side path joined the main one. As it caught the rays of the sinking sun full on, its brightness was dazzling to eyes grown accustomed to the shadows. My daughter was jumping up and down, trying to grab one of the willow's dangling branches. All right, I would wow her by grabbing a whole bunch. Shading my eyes with one hand, I approached my daughter in the light.

While light was everywhere in various forms, the "territory of light" was the single mother's newfound apartment that gave her freedom to live on her own after her husband abandoned her. The wide windows that brought in sunlight to the rooms enabled her to expel the actual and symbolic shadows and darkness lurking in the corners. The novel thus explored how it is to claim just such a territory, such a certain sanctuary. Just how it is to search for and live in a clean, well-lighted place. By the novel's end, we saw the mother, after bathing her life in the light for some time, expelling darkness in the process, ready to face darkness once again as she made arrangements to transfer to a new apartment room that was now placed in a dark, secluded corner.

*

When Yūko Tsushima passed away on February 2016, she was at the peak of her literary prowess. Unfortunately for readers in English, we have not yet encountered the full range of her achievement and genius. Much remained untranslated in Tsushima's oeuvre. In contrast to the themes of motherhood and pregnancy in the early novels, there was what might be termed a Tsushima late style. To be more precise, this style constituted a geographic and thematic shift in subject in her later works. Already, through the prism of single mothers trying to cope with their situation amid fears and insecurities, the novelist was able to distill the rhythms and textures of a challenged, solitary life. In her recent novels, she turned from the domestic upheavals of a split nuclear family to the varied classical and historical themes in Japanese fiction. Think of wars, famines, and religion. Then combine it with Tsushima's modernist techniques in full throttle, already apparent in her early fiction and exemplified in Laughing Wolf, originally published in 2000 and her only novel translated so far in this mold.

In terms of geographic reach, Tsushima's settings of late veered toward Eastern and Southeast Asia. According to Harcourt, her final novel was partly set in Macau and Batavia during the 17th century. As evident from an interview with her in 2014, posted in Youtube (here) with subtitles by Harcourt, Tsushima was influenced by indigenous people's worldviews, particularly the Ainu's, and ecological issues in the early 1990s, something that have influenced her recent work. What is clear is that the full extent of her innovation in novel writing is yet to be revealed in translation.

I received a review copy of the book from the publisher. I have to commend them for the increasing interest they take on Tsushima's fiction. Child of Fortune, which has gone out of print, will be republished by them later in the year. My gratitude also for the translator, Geraldine Harcourt, for her correspondence in early 2016.

How could Walter Benjamin impute so much interpretation to what the angel in Paul Klee’s painting was contemplating? Was that what the caricature-like drawing actually thinking? As it turned out, there was an alternative image for the "melancholically beautiful" image of the angel of history. In a footnote to thesis IX of his Filipino translation of Benjamin's work, Ramon Guillermo mentioned another fascinating image, the one that was also used as cover page of the translation:

“Angelus Novus”: A painting by Klee (1920) that was for a time owned by Benjamin. But Bolívar Echeverría's [2] conjecture may have a basis: that Benjamin's main inspiration for thesis IX was the drawing called “L’histoire” (History) from Iconologie by H.F. Gravelot and Ch. N. Cochin (1791) (Echeverría 2005, 25y). [my translation]

In "L'histoire", the angel's head was turned to the right. Faced with a specter of destruction around her, the angel of history had chosen not to be a mere spectator. With vigor and passion, she transcribed what was happening in real time. Her right hand held the pen; her left supported the book.

And what of the figure of death in front of her? The old man's back functioned as the writing table, inclined at just the appropriate angle for the angel to write at ease. Like the angel, death was concentrating on his task, very intent to not make the slightest move, full in his support for the angel's role as historian.

And what was she writing about? Presumably something important, so urgent it needed to be put on paper. It had to do with a conflagration, an event that needed an angel to witness and record. We could somehow recognize a man and a woman fleeing a burning city in the background. Where were the rest of city dwellers? It appeared as if they were casualties of some kind of war. The magnitude of destruction was discernible from the smoke covering almost the entire horizon.

Death was assisting our angel historian, but his long scythe was almost leaning toward her left wing. Is writing history akin to a brush with death? Was the angel all too willing to sacrifice her wing just to be able to get a snapshot of war?

And what was that book beneath her? Tucidide on top of a trumpet, muffling the music of the instrument? What was the Athenian historian doing in this apocalyptic setting? Was he providing the framework of history for the angel to pattern her own historical narrative?

And that pointed, pyramid-like structure on the left? It was the one image that corresponded well to the perpetual accumulation of rubble in thesis IX. It was the structure of wreckage that could reach up to heaven, being driven by the storm called Progress (Fortschritt).

The drawing in Chavelot and Cochin's Iconologie certainly was a more illustrative and dramatic representation of the angel of history than Klee's. The reason for Benjamin's indirection, if it was that, may be moot at this point. In any case, the latter's cartoon sketch of an angel, as interpreted by Benjamin, was a helpless historian in the face of storm: his wings were pathetically frozen when struck by the force of the wind. L'histoire, on the other hand, was a more militant angel. She was unfazed by the events unfolding around her, and not even bothered by the sharp scythe of death. Faithful and objective was her transcription of human catastrophe so that the readers would be able to decipher the pattern of folly. Her purpose was clear: to be the conscience and the counsel of history. So that we never repeat it over and over and over again.

Notes:[1] From "Tesis IX", in Hinggil sa Konsepto ng Kasaysayan by Walter Benjamin, trans. Ramon Guillermo. Translation: Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, [the angel] sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. (from Thesis IX, trans. Dennis Redmond) [2] For his translation of Benjamin’s theses from German to Filipino, Ramon Guillermo also consulted Bolívar Echeverría’s 2008 Spanish translation of the theses, in addition to Benjamin's French translation of his German original. The references at the end of Guillermo's translation also listed "El ángel de la historia y el materialismo histórico”, in Echeverría (ed.), La mirada del Ángel: En torno a las tesis sobre la historia de Walter Benjamin (México: Universidad Autónoma de México).Image of L'histoire from: Materialist Theology

February 4, 2018

Last February 2017, I wrote the following in a blog post about the impending publication of Nick Joaquín's The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic:

The inclusion of his famous playA Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1966) in the Penguin anthology was an inspired decision. The three-act "elegy", which the playwright also labeled as "a novel in the form of a play", was a distillation of his romantic ideas on Spanish Filipino culture, its struggle against modernity and war, symbolized by the protagonists—two spinster sisters—and their tenacious hold on a highly symbolic picture painted by their disillusioned father and inspired by Greek mythology. A Portrait was the writer's statement about art and its role in restoring ceremonial traditions, art and its fragility against the savage wars of peace. The writer was much concerned about the inability of culture (Spanish Filipino customs and ceremonies) to adapt to encroaching lawlessness and to reconcile the history of the past with the chaos of the present. Much like Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" in On the Concept of History (Thesis IX), after Paul Klee's Angelus Novus (1920), Joaquín's elegiac source spring was looking back at the past with the foreknowledge that the future storm would bring ruin to memory.

Vicente L. Rafael, who introduced the book, was reading my mind, and I, his. The book was published in April 2017, and I did not recall reading an advance copy of Rafael's introduction prior to that. The final paragraph of his introduction reads:

Nick Joaquin's stories provide us with such counsel. Swept by the catastrophes of colonialism and war, Joaquin, like St. Sylvestre [in his 1946 story "The Mass of St. Sylvestre"], looked both ways. Lingering on the threshold of what had happened and what was yet to come, he found himself irresistibly drawn, like the Angel of History, to the debris of colonial catastrophes that just kept piling up around him. He sought to retrieve from the ruins of modernity the means for conveying experience—his own as well as others'—in stories about forgotten legends, repressed events, flawed fathers, two-naveled women, and the miracles of a merciful Virgin that continue to emerge from the ever-perplexing and vertigo-inducing history of a certain Philippines. We, whoever we are, receive his stories told from a ruined world, hearing and perhaps sharing them as we would the shards of our own lives.

Rafael provided an endnote to the penultimate sentence:

The image of the "Angel of History," suggested in this instance by the image of the myriad angels surrounding St. Sylvestre as he leads his procession, is of course drawn from Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus and discussed by Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, 257-58. I borrow the term "vertigo-inducing" from the great historical comparativist Benedict Anderson, who uses it to describe the conjunctural strangeness of the Philippines in world history. See Anderson, "The First Filipino," London Review of Books 19(20) (Oct. 16, 1997): 22-23 [online]. He, too, was an admirer of Nick Joaquin and Walter Benjamin.

Anderson was of course an admirer of Benjamin. He wrote an introduction to the Filipino translation of Benjamin's treatise, Hinggil sa Konsepto ng Kasaysayan (High Chair, 2013), translated by Ramon Guillermo. To me, the image of the Angel of History, in relation to Joaquín's oeuvre, was suggested by Anderson himself, by Benjamin himself, and by Joaquín himself.

I bought Guillermo's translation in the Manila International Book Fair 2016. According to my Goodreads account, I marked it as "to-read" in October and "shelved" it in the "2016" folder in December (i.e., read the book in the latter part of 2016). Anderson's striking description of the Angel of History was what particularly drew me to it. Here's the relevant passage; forgive the lengthy context at the start.

In the growing darkness of the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist thinker and leader wrote, incarcerated in Mussolini's Fascist jails, that communists had to combine "pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will." Kafka had written not long before his early death: "There is hope, but not for us." Benjamin, who had to flee to Paris when Hitler came to power in 1933, watched Franco bloodily win the Civil War in Spain, Tokyo's armies cruelly occupying a huge part of China, anti-Semitic dictatorships in Portugal and central, eastern and southeastern Europe, France defeated by Hitler and now led by Marshal Pétain's rightwing dictatorship, but only in its southern regions, and Stalin's compact with Hitler in 1939, whereby eastern Europe was divided between them. Benjamin's, [sic] "Theses on the Concept of History", never fully finished, was written in the doomed Paris of 1940. It is from this devastated last work which come some of the most unforgettable, despairing passages. "All documents of civilization are at the same time documents of barbarism" is the shortest, while the most melancholically beautiful is the image of the Angel of History, who has his back to the future and contemplates all human history as an accumulating, unending pile of wreckage, ruin, and disaster. Benjamin wrote that the Angel can not turn his back from the past because his wings are caught in an unstoppable storm coming from paradise, "the storm that we call progress."

Joaquín himself was that same angel of history, enacting the same gesture of looking squarely at the ruins of Manila after the Japanese bombed it in the Second World War. The anguish of the novelist was evident in his elegiac and edgy descriptions of postwar Manila in The Woman Who Had Two Navels (the novel version) as "flat and spiky, its bared ribs and twisted limbs a graph of pain in the air", "traffic brimming between the banks of rubble", "the ruins noisy with night clubs", "a glittering fashion show in the bullet-pocked ballroom of a gutted hotel".

In Nick: A Portrait of the Artist Nick Joaquin (2011)—a biography of the novelist co-written by his nephew Tony Joaquín—the angel of history was pained at the image of destruction and atrocity in the walled city in front of him. The book was quoted in Ruel S. De Vera's review article:

There are many memorable scenes in “Nick,” but probably the most heartbreaking was that of Nick surveying the ruins of Intramuros after it had been razed to the ground during the Second World War: “Intramuros was so familiar and close to Nick’s heart. He knew where each building had stood. As he gazed around him and took in the destruction and realized all that had been destroyed and lost, a deep loud groan escaped from him and his body began to shake all over as sobs rose from the very pit of his stomach.”

I saw Ang Larawan: The Musical in cinema early this year. This adaptation of Joaquín's famous play was full of intimations and prefigurations of war. The role of art, history, tradition, and culture was sustained amid the spreading tentacles of modernity, war, and progress. The controversial portrait at the center of the play, the one owned by two unmarried sisters, might as well be the same horrifying image the angel of history was witnessing: the image that could crush his wings and send him tumbling into the future.

February 2, 2018

The Hemingway school of writing isn't one I'm fond of. In his review of a bestseller, Chad W. Post described it as "short, direct, concise, with little abstraction."

A book that is solid, something you can easily envision, with sentences you never get lost in.
...

The whole novel is unchallenging in that way. It’s the kind of writing that you can sort of relax into, the type of writing that lets you forget that your life is stressful and a struggle. I can see why this appeals to a lot of people—it’s the sort of writing that uncomplicates your consciousness as you read it.

It's the kind of judgement that I can't hand down to Hôtel Splendid, Marie Redonnet's novel of a hotel's decline. To say that it belongs to the Hemingway school of writing was a superficial claim. That claim was without basis, uncalled for. In fact, it was a travesty for it was the opposite case. In fact, at this point, I found this (my) introduction to the book already stale.

Hôtel Splendid belonged to the Redonnet school of writing. It was not a bestseller. But in the year of the fire rooster, one of my most rewarding reading times was spent on this slim novel of parasitism and survival. For sure, the sentences were crisp and short and clipped. Subject was followed by verb and terminated by predicate, but that was not the hard and fast rule. Some dependent clauses allowed some fresh air to unclog the musty air of the sentences. But taken out of context, certain passages would make for a mannered and insufferable style. It was the arrangement and clustering of sentences that give the short novel its heft and depth. Redonnet plowed on and gave an indubitable testament to the dreariness and clarity of suffering.

She wants me to wash her. That's hard for me because she has an odor that makes me queasy. She has never worked. Mother used to support her, and now I do. I inherited the Hôtel Splendid. But in exchange, I owe an allowance to my sisters. They chose to come and live at the hotel instead of taking the allowance. Here they are housed, fed, and served. Maybe I should not have agreed to this arrangement. Ada and Adel left the hotel very young with mother. They never came back until mother died. I am the only one who never left the Hôtel Splendid. But now that they have settled in, they are not about to leave. They have made themselves at home. They have taken the two nicest rooms, but that does not prevent them from complaining about the Hôtel Splendid's poor condition and lack of comfort. I should not let them get the better of me. I keep them alive, thanks to my work and the hotel. But the Splendid brings in less and less. It needs repairs. I don't have the means.

Think of Julio Cortázar's "House Taken Over", replace house with hotel, replace house owners with female narrator, then replace the "colonizers" with the narrator's two sisters (Ada and Adel). It's a stretch of a comparison, but the same feeling of foreboding, suspense, and helplessness that haunt Julio's haunted house pervaded Redonnet's decrepit, and hardly splendid now, hotel. But this was not evident at the level of the sentence but at the furious stream of sentences. Page 49 summed the whole quite well: "And since everything always goes wrong at once, her lavatory is blocked." And since the hypothetical realm of "if worst comes to worst" was made flesh, the comedy was uncanny for its pathetic tragedy.

The swamp is swallowing up the cemetery, because there will be nothing but the swamp. Even though she [Ada] limps because of her rheumatism and has to walk with a cane, she will not give up going to the cemetery. She will go as long as there is even just a piece of a gravestone still visible. She says grandmother's gravestone is like a boat that has been shipwrecked and is slowly sinking. She has more and more difficulty walking. It takes her all day to go from the hotel to the cemetery and back. She has a touch of gout also. She is going to be a cripple soon if this keeps up. You would think Ada's rheumatism was contagious. I walk with a cane too. Since Ada took grandmother's cane, I use a stick. It does not make as good a cane. The guests complain about the noise that the two canes make in the hotel. With my rheumatism, it's painful to bend over to unblock the lavatories. The guests should be more careful. No matter how much I tell them that, they don't care. Adel sets a bad example for them. She treats her lavatory like a trash can. It's disgusting. Ada's appearance is changing. She has the beginnings of a goiter.

One only had to note in the passage how the health of the characters and the state of the surrounding graveyard went on a downward spiral ("she limps because of her rheumatism and has to walk with a cane ... shipwrecked and is slowly sinking ... more and more difficulty walking ... a touch of gout also ... I walk with a cane too ... With my rheumatism ... the beginnings of a goiter") to gauge the amount of change happening within a short span of time. Anthony at timesflowstemmed observed this uncommon space-time compression wherein "situations and emotions change polarity within a few paragraphs". By free association, Redonnet was heaping up anarchy upon chaos in the hotel and its environs. Everything was going the way of doom. The compression was also evident from one immediate sentence to the next.

The plumber is my only ally. He comes as soon as I call him, and I call him more and more often. It is incredible the things he pulls out of the pipes. What would become of me without him? I am worried because he had a small but unexpected attack, and now he has to keep to his bed. Now would be a bad time for the pipes to let me down. The pipes have become all porous. You can see that just by running your finger over them, your finger is wet. It isn't a good sign that the pipes are porous. It's the same with the wood, which is turning spongy. Fortunately the guests are not observant. [emphases supplied]

From a rhetorical question ("What would become of me without him?") to "a small but unexpected" shift in the health of the plumber. From wishful thinking for the pipes to not let her down, to a stab of reality that the pipes have, really, talk about the timing, become all porous. The sentences rambled along in a montage of ruin and destruction. The hotel turned and turned in the widening gyre. It was not for nothing that the hotel took its name after a favorite movie of the narrator's grandmother. In that movie the hotel, that was actually right beside a swamp, was in an oasis in the middle of a desert. In the movie the wind continually blows; the oasis "was slowly becoming choked" with the sands of the desert.

Hôtel Splendid was not as inscrutable as Kafka's castle, but almost as unavailing and mythic in its cruelty. In addition to the three siblings, hotel and swamp were like characters whose states of fixity were challenged by the inherent impermanence of things. Would that the vicious cycle of life degrading unto death was celebrated through natural, pure neglect or deliberate, man-made disasters. By the time an apathetic and silent figure (maybe a burned out artist figure) checked in at the Hôtel Splendid near the end of the novel, first as guest then as a potential long-time boarder, the novel had taken its full course, following the contours of human existence and the rhythm of the swamp. The narrator was still asserting her self-respect and dignity, things tangible that's left when everything else went the way of dust and mote. She might as well be the muse haunting the hotel's now-ghostly existence.